Breaking Down Quantum Compilation: Profiling and Identifying Costly Passes

2025-04-21

AI Summary

Quantum program compilation overhead often dominates end-to-end execution time, yet fine-grained attribution of time consumption across individual compilation stages remains lacking. Method: This work presents the first systematic profiling of the compilation pipeline in the mainstream quantum SDK Qiskit, introducing a runtime performance attribution methodology based on per-pass timing instrumentation and statistical analysis to quantify time distribution across optimization, qubit mapping, and gate synthesis stages. Contribution/Results: Experiments reveal substantial structural heterogeneity in compilation bottlenecks: for QFT circuits, single optimization or gate synthesis passes consume up to 87% of total compilation time; for GHZ circuits, mapping alone accounts for over 99%. These findings expose critical dependencies between circuit structure and stage-specific latency, providing the first empirically grounded, fine-grained performance insights to guide pre-compilation strategies and scenario-aware compiler optimizations—thereby informing the design of efficient, production-grade quantum compilers.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Combinatorial Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

With the increasing capabilities of quantum systems, the efficient, practical execution of quantum programs is becoming more critical. Each execution includes compilation time, which accounts for substantial overhead of the overall program runtime. To address this challenge, proposals that leverage precompilation techniques have emerged, whereby entire circuits or select components are precompiled to mitigate the compilation time spent during execution. Considering the impact of compilation time on quantum program execution, identifying the contribution of each individual compilation task to the execution time is necessary in directing the community's research efforts towards the development of an efficient compilation and execution pipeline. In this work, we perform a preliminary analysis of the quantum circuit compilation process in Qiskit, examining the cumulative runtime of each individual compilation task and identifying the tasks that most strongly impact the overall compilation time. Our results indicate that, as the desired level of optimization increases, circuit optimization and gate synthesis passes become the dominant tasks in compiling a Quantum Fourier Transform, with individual passes consuming up to 87% of the total compilation time. Mapping passes require the most compilation time for a GHZ state preparation circuit, accounting for over 99% of total compilation time.

Problem

• Profiling quantum compilation passes to identify time-consuming tasks
• Analyzing impact of optimization levels on compilation efficiency
• Identifying dominant passes in specific quantum circuit types

Innovation

• Profiling quantum compilation passes runtime
• Identifying costly optimization and synthesis tasks
• Analyzing Qiskit compilation bottlenecks systematically